Collaborative governance is an emerging form of governance, based on Direct democracy, supported by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It enables any interested individual to collaborate in the creation/modification/deletion of policies and laws of a community. The name of this concept is a re-brand of the computing-specific term Open source governance.

Contents

Requirements

A community willing to adopt this methodology of governance must hold democratic basis and ensure access to ICT for all its members.

Openness

Collaborative governance is broadly inspired by the Free and Open source software (FOSS), which —through the availability of its source code— liberally grants to the users the right to study and change its design. Because of this, FOSS tends to improve and evolve extremely rapidly. Open content movement, a generalisation of FOSS initiatives for every type of creative work, is an inspirer as well.

In an collaborative governanced-community, there exist direct participation of all the governed on every aspect of its government, making it really open. Then the community may benefit as FOSS users do, translated into democratic policies and up-to-date laws.

Use of technology

In Direct democracy, decision-making needs of the frequent gathering of the members of the community. When this is not very small, without the aid of technology it turns difficult to reach quorum because of spatial barriers (each member has to mobilise him/herself to the meeting point, which in turn, should be prepared to receive all the participants) and temporal barriers (not only at the same place, the members need to be coordinated to be there at the same time).

While overcoming these barriers is perfectly possible, without technology is uncomfortable. Also much information must be gathered for the overall decision-making process to succeed, however, technology may provide important forces leading to the type of empowerment needed for participation in this kind of government.

Features

How a 'Practical direct democracy' is.

Continuous

Participation is intended to be an every-day action, not a discrete and time wide-separated event...

Voluntary

Collaborative governance does not demand that every person participate in every decision. It simply allows people to participate as much or as little as they please in any decision.

When a member has desire of doing a submission, he/she will provide a better quality contribution than a member who has the same information but is obligated (and so not self-motivated) to do it.

Decentralised

As participation is non-coercive, it is thus expected that people will tend to channel themselves into specific areas of expertise and interest. They will not be restricted to those areas, but they will have the opportunity to become "leaders" in those fields simply by their reputation.

Due to the notable quantity of subjects and its wide disciplinary spectrum that are covered by a government, the distribution of the tasks between the community may result in better quality decision-making.

Transparent

Radical transparency principle. As Collaborative governance uses computers, all the information passes through them. It is at hand to archive it and make it available for audition. Transparency fights corruption, an inherent shadow in legitime governments.